NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review

NVIDIA’s Maxwell age of graphics processing begins with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards. What you’ll see below is a brief look at the higher-powered of these two cards, tracking the performance of the NVIDIA-made reference card.

The GeForce GTX 980 is based on the NVIDIA Maxwell family of GPUs, working with several new graphics features outlined for the first time this week. With Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), 4K resolution will be output and filtered down to the native display resolution of the user for extra crispness. Multi-Frame sampled AA (MFAA) creates image quality similar to 4xMSAA for the performance cost of 2xMSAA. NVIDIA Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI) creates a more realistic lighting environment for gaming with high frame-rate rendering of fully dynamic global illumination.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is optimized for 2560 x 1600 gaming with top-level settings. NVIDIA suggests that 4K displays work with two GTX 980 cards OR one card with SLI “for the most demanding games with maximum settings and AA.” The following specifications are set for the 10.5-inch reference board we’re reviewing here:

The gallery you see next shows GameWorks Technologies in play and optimized for the GTX 980. We’ll be testing these games when the time comes – when they’re out, that is to say. Or in War Thunder‘s case, when they’re ready to rock with all of these features in place.

Basic Benchmarks

What you’re about to see is a set of basic graphics benchmark results from three high-powered games. Again, we’ll be testing additional games in the future – this is just the beginning.

Power Consumption / Noise

Power Consumption is one of the points NVIDIA is attempting to drive home with this card, noting that Maxwell is far better than cards of the past in bringing more performance at less cost.

Running Crysis 3, Load Power Consumption is around 300 Watts – that’s easily amongst the lowest we’ve seen in the last few years’ batches of cards. Idle Power Consumption sits closer to 71 Watts – again, amongst the lowest in cards out on the market today.

Another bit is noise. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is more silent than any NVIDIA card before it – at least on the high end. There should be no reason why you’d ever hear this card make a peep inside your custom-built tower when you’re running idle.

Wrap-up

Look powerful enough for you? While we’re not skyrocketing up in to the Titan range for cash, we’re still getting some of the highest-powered graphics processing on the planet.

As of the launch of this card, the following prices are in place: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980: $549 USD, GTX 970: $329, GTX 760: changed to $219. The GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780, and GTX 770 are discontinued. Launch for this board will be September 19th – the same day this review is released – with immediate availability.

NOTE: We’ll be adding more detailed results as we have more time to test.